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Is there techniques in cinema that can’t be done?


Cale Boys

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Watching movies like Interstellar and Inception, seeing the sets and absolutely mind blowing engineering that goes on behind them or the endless and countless hours of CGI in any movie, is there even a time where a director or crew say “I don’t think that’s possible” 

 

I feel like any vision can be pulled off in today’s cinema world. Given the budget, anything can be pulled off through CGI or technical knowledge of people who have been in the industry forever. But I would like to know, do you think in year 2020 the top of the top film makers ever say “I don’t think that can be done”  

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I believe the top-of-the-top filmmakers would say "I don't think that can be done with that time and budget", but we're always surprised by the ingenuity of low budget filmmakers and the ever changing technological landscape they work in.

The only thing that I don't think is possible is to fully bridge the uncanny valley effect. We're getting damn close, as evident in Alita: Battle Angel and Avatar, but it still isn't quite there...yet. I believe Avatar 2 will be pivotal in that aspect.*

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*Deep fakes grew quickly in the fringes of the internet, but are now quickly becoming the easiest and better method to circumvent the uncanny valley effect for faces. Instead of building a CG face, we can deep fake it instead. Plus, it's significantly cheaper. Yay low budget!

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I’m just trying to think of a situation where the entire crew and director/DP/Post production says “hmm I don’t know if we can even CGI that” I feel like anything these days can be made through CGI or huge engineered sets like the rotating hallway scene in Inception. 

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I think James Cameron has been asking that question every day which is why the Avatar sequels have taken 11 years and cost such a ridiculous amount of record breaking money.   He's probably pushed every envelope we have and hopefully it will be worth it.  Now the question just becomes whether we'll be watching the end result in our homes or if we'll even have theaters to go back in to.

 

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8 minutes ago, Cale Boys said:

I’m just trying to think of a situation where the entire crew and director/DP/Post production says “hmm I don’t know if we can even CGI that” I feel like anything these days can be made through CGI or huge engineered sets like the rotating hallway scene in Inception. 

Well that's going to be more of a budget/resources issue than anything. Obviously there are practical limitations like actually shooting inside an active volcano or whatever. Really expansive locations are still pretty tricky to do even in CG. Only the biggest films out there can create entire cities for example although software like Clarisse is closing that gap its still a monumental undertaking. But because computers can simulate real-world lighting and physics (with less and less computing power) the sky is basically the limit. I'm not convinced we've crossed the uncanny valley yet, but we are damn close and might really be there for practical purposes. I thought Rogue One was pretty impressive and all the head/body replacement stuff done in The Social Network was seamless and that was ten years ago! If no one knew that Peter Cushing had died (or not aged since A New Hope), I'm not sure how many people would've really been able to tell the difference. I'm also not convinced that de-aging is quite there yet, in the same way that aging a young actor with hair/makeup never quite looks convincing (see Guy Pearce in Prometheus). So I guess there are limitations. 

The UPM and AD should identify these issues way early in the process, maybe even before the film gets greenlit and into pre-production. The set is probably not the place to discover the director wants to do something insane that may not be possible (if for no other reason that it might be actually be possible with enough pre-planning and getting everyone's head in the game to figure it out). 

The use of Unreal Engine and other game engines to create realtime virtual environments like what was done on The Mandalorian is a real game changer to help directors not have to rely so much on green screen. Also allows DPs to extend magic hour indefinitely. I think some very interesting things will come of that. 

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9 hours ago, AJ Young said:

*Deep fakes grew quickly in the fringes of the internet, but are now quickly becoming the easiest and better method to circumvent the uncanny valley effect for faces. Instead of building a CG face, we can deep fake it instead. Plus, it's significantly cheaper. Yay low budget!

It's impressive how sometimes lowbudget approaches have leaped frogged ahead of the big budget approaches to VFX. Deep fakes is one example, and VFX ageing techniques seems to be another area the little guy is punching well above their pay grade:
 

 

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5 hours ago, Phil Jackson said:

I'm also not convinced that de-aging is quite there yet, in the same way that aging a young actor with hair/makeup never quite looks convincing (see Guy Pearce in Prometheus). So I guess there are limitations. 

I agree with what you said Phil. I would add though, as a VFX worker myself, the issue I have with these kinds of conversations - akin to the "Practical vs. CG" discussion - is that all of the VFX industry is treated as "one entity" in the discussion, without regard to the specific talents of a given team. The de-aging that the team at Lola FX (which was set up specifically to do de-aging work as a spin-off from another VFX house, Hydraulx) did for Michael Douglas in Ant-Man is impeccable, and I'm thinking that if you had the late Dick Smith available to do the age makeup in Prometheus, it would have been equally as flawless. 

Even though the tech brings everybody's level up, the stuff is still really difficult and skill/talent makes the difference. Also the Irishman comparison is not really fair, as choices are made on shows like that to go for a certain look. So they may have tested the technique used in the "deep fake" video and decided against it for creative reasons. It kinda gets into the territory of  "Cats" - it's not the VFX teams' fault that the work gets laughed at for the wrong reasons, those choices were made at a higher level.

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9 hours ago, Webster C said:

I agree with what you said Phil. I would add though, as a VFX worker myself, the issue I have with these kinds of conversations - akin to the "Practical vs. CG" discussion - is that all of the VFX industry is treated as "one entity" in the discussion, without regard to the specific talents of a given team. The de-aging that the team at Lola FX (which was set up specifically to do de-aging work as a spin-off from another VFX house, Hydraulx) did for Michael Douglas in Ant-Man is impeccable, and I'm thinking that if you had the late Dick Smith available to do the age makeup in Prometheus, it would have been equally as flawless. 

Even though the tech brings everybody's level up, the stuff is still really difficult and skill/talent makes the difference. Also the Irishman comparison is not really fair, as choices are made on shows like that to go for a certain look. So they may have tested the technique used in the "deep fake" video and decided against it for creative reasons. It kinda gets into the territory of  "Cats" - it's not the VFX teams' fault that the work gets laughed at for the wrong reasons, those choices were made at a higher level.

The other thing is a lot of people, even some industry people, do not understand what is and isn't visual effects (vs makeup vs special effects vs art direction). Like you said Cats got a bad rep for what is essentially a design/art direction problem. A lot of the public thinks that visual effects are more prominent than they really are. There was a lot of joking about Rogue One, but that work is actually very well done but I think people see what they want to believe. Some of this is the result of the plastic-y way movies look these days which I think has trained people not to take VFX seriously. Over set-extensioned. Over color graded. With camera moves that break the laws of physics, etc. I don't think digital helps this either. A movie like Aquaman or some of the Marvel movies, the line is so blurred between what's practical and what's not, its forgivable for the audience to confuse the two.

Movies of the mid to late 90s and into the early 2000s still had a very grounded feel in a way that today's blockbuster movies do not. The first Transformers for all its histrionics still feels like it exists in the real world, but I don't get that at all from Wonder Woman or Guardians of the Galaxy which are basically cartoons with live actors. Even the island scenes in the last Jurassic World where the volcano is erupting looked oddly fake despite being shot on location in Oahu and I've waxed poetically about how every space movie looks like concept art these days with waaay too many nebulas, unnatural lighting, etc. When I see something like Ad Astra or what Ridley did in Alien: Covenant with simple elegant space shots, its a nice change of pace. 

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I will add to the OP that I have on occasion come across a script where I've thought, "how in the world are we going to do this?" I think screenwriters not understanding the limitations of what's practical (regardless of whether its possible) can be an issue. If a screenwriter writes a scene that shows a toddler drowning, for example, that's going to very difficult to pull off. Good producers and ADs should be able to feel this out though. The writers of Star Trek: The Next Generation would famously come in writing all these action scenes and space battles only to be told they had to could only afford four phaser shots for the entire episode. It's one of the reasons that show is so talky compared to later shows like DS9, Voyager, BSG, and SeaQuest DSV

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